More than 100 people, including lawyers, judges, community leaders, students and professors from Wayne State’s Law School gathered on Oct. 23 to hear Constance L. Rice, a prominent civil rights activist and attorney, speak about the 2008 presidential election, race and the future of civil rights.
“This particular election you will not see again; it is unique,” Rice said. “This election is transformative, and it has opened up a chance for radical reconstruction, because only in times of penultimate cataclysm do you get a chance to re-write the rules of gravity in our political and economic system.”
Rice has filed and won traditional class-action civil rights cases redressing police misconduct, race, and discrimination based on sex, unfair public policy in transportation, probation and public housing.
“The question is can the middle class be saved?” Rice asked. “We don’t even mention the poor anymore.”
Rice made a comparison between rural America and inner-city America.
“There are a lot of parallels rural folks to inner-city folks who have been left behind,” Rice said. “The rural have been left with methamphetamine and the inner-city is left with a crack cocaine economy.”
According to Rice, this election is far from over. For Barack Obama to really win this election, he must replace the silent majority with the new progressive majority. Rice believes the future of civil rights isn’t so much about race.
“Most of my cases I’m suing folks who got elected because of the Voting Rights Act,” Rice said. She has spent her entire career carrying out “his cases and his vision of what civil rights cases ought to be,” Rice said referring to Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1999, Rice launched a coalition lawsuit that won $750 million for new school construction in Los Angeles — money previously slated for less crowded, more affluent suburban school districts. Rice’s legal work has led to multi-racial coalitions of lawyers and clients to win more than $10 billion in damages and policy changes. Rice and her colleagues have led campaigns and bond initiatives that transferred more than $25 billion into systems that support the poor.
“I don’t represent any one middle class anymore,” Rice said. “My practice is poverty, and it is race compounding. My clients are the members of the gangs, the men in prison and on death row, the women who are being asked to go to work everyday with no child care, those are my clients.”
“We need her here in Detroit,” said Tom Withers, a local community member. “It doesn’t make any sense that we don’t have someone here, who is willing to fight, and who has the actual knowledge to bring fundamental change to our schools and communities. I love Constance Rice.”
Rice released a highly-regarded report in January 2007, “A Call to Action: A case for a comprehensive solution to L.A.’s Gang Violence Epidemic,” which was commissioned by the City Council’s Ad hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development. She has received more than 60 major awards for her work in expanding opportunity and advancing multi-racial democracy.
“The future of civil rights is getting that global vision,” she said. “I got news for you — we in California are connected to Mexico. King told us that we are connected to every other people and country on this planet.
“I think this election goes beyond anything that has to do with race. This is the chance to become the fire that King said we must become; now let’s go out and do it.”
